In normal operation, the leading car informs the following car about its position, speed, acceleration, and a time stamp for this information. The following car does a sanity check to make sure that the data are coherent. If so, the following car will apply the same acceleration, and thus (in this simple model) tracks the leading car perfectly. A user can control the correctness of the leading car information by setting the parameter "fault" to 0 or 1, (0 indicating the correct information). If the following car receives uncorrect information, it abandons the received acceleration, and relies on distance measurements for the tacking. In this mode, the following car will apply zero acceleration, if it is too close to the leading car, and maximum acceleration if it is too far from the leading car. This (simple- minded) control law results in a rather jerky ride.

The Block Diagram for the model was constructed using the VisualSim schematic editor called ModelBuilder.